Ed Luce: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you ask French people do they think their children will have a future as good as what they’ve had, you get some of the highest rates of no in the world. If you look at Germany, it’s in some ways economically more positive, but most of German industry is extremely vulnerable to Chinese manufacturing. And just as Chinese manufacturing has done that to Italy, Germany probably also is vulnerable, has poorer native demographics, has barely had real‑wage growth since 2000, has now a higher rate of people at work. But is it the case that this is happening first to the Anglo countries simply because they’re more open, and the future comes here first? It used to come to California first. Sometimes I joke it comes to Israel and Singapore first, because those are small, fairly open places where a small impact spreads quite rapidly. Is that a possible hypothesis? It may be a probable hypothesis, and hence my pessimism about the future of liberal democracy on the continent. I would accept that France is probably going to go through some restructuring that is going to cause a lot of political gnashing of teeth. Macron’s program is a sort of soft Thatcherism, maybe Blairism. I don’t know what you call it, but Macron, the rubber’s going to hit the road quite soon. He’s got a majority. The En Marche has a majority in the French assembly, and a lot of these people have never served in politics before. That was part of the appeal. It’s a wide, but thin, coalition that has been assembled by a very skillful young man ‑‑ and I now really do feel old, because he’s at least a decade younger than me ‑‑ by promising all things to all people. Very clever politics. Not necessarily a good program for governing. France has a politics of anti‑politics, of people who don’t vote, and of people who protest by bringing politics to a halt. I think we’re going to see that tested. I don’t necessarily disagree with the premise of that. I think France and Germany are going to be subjected to a lot of harsh wins, as they already are, but they’ll get harsher, as China grows and others grow. The proposition of whether their democracies are better equipped to cope with this will be put to the test. I do think, though, that there are some things they know that we don’t. Denmark, for example, has an employer government program where everybody can train at anything they like for two weeks a year, and most Danish employees avail of that. They train in stuff, and so that the labor market turnover in Denmark is way higher than it is in the rest of Europe, because people don’t feel wedded to one skill. They feel much more confident in a gig economy to move around, be more flexible, and change jobs. I don’t want to generalize too grossly about which democracies are doing badly and which are doing well. What’s important is what unites us, and that is a pretty profound existential challenge to how we do business, if you like. What’s the most plausible scenarios through which Trump and/or Brexit work out for the better? I’m not saying you have to agree with it, but if you had to say, the most plausible scenarios.…

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